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"an experiment in creating a friendly and intelligent community around sharing quality content" Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate con

"an experiment in creating a friendly and intelligent community around sharing quality content" Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. They're all roughly the same and none are that good. Upvotes suck and we need to move past them. If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm. Anything short of that I just don't care about.

rhizome 13y ago
You're right that it's a problem of Information Architecture, but recommendation engines aren't the only next step possible.
- icedog 13y ago
  Please indulge us on other next steps.
mitchty 13y ago
I agree upvotes suck, but I think part of the problem is both displaying the score, and allowing downvotes to influence things. I'd like more builtin randomness for things. Display comments but display them randomly instead of by any sort of score maybe. But then this all belies the biggest issue I have with reddit/hn/whatever. Trying to follow discussions is painful as its hard to ascertain what has been posted since you last read things and not. That alone is my biggest gripe with most of this, even newsgroup readers made things much easier to follow discussion. But I'm curious, how would the netflix style algorithms work in practice? It would seem like it would just encourage more filterbubbleish input not? Occasionally off topic news tends to be somewhat engaging and I don't like the idea of removing serendipity amongst news/programming articles. I may not use haskell for example often or even at all, but lots of the time I do see articles that really end up being well worth my time to read.
raganwald 13y ago
Perhaps they simply want to create a community that discourages "Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content," and encourages If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm.
jeremymcanally 13y ago
That's somewhat close to what http://getprismatic.com http://getprismatic.com is doing. It works fairly well, but I wish I could explicitly tell it what I want to read rather than it just assuming what I want from things I and others tweet about.
twoodfin 13y ago
One of reddit's key features in the early days was a "recommended" page that was supposedly trained by your up/down votes. It never seemed to work all that well and was abandoned after a year or so.
- incision 13y ago
  I always though this was a horrible idea for a system where users are simultaneously consumers expressing their preferences and curators/creators being rated through the same metric. I recall lots of angry back and forth between folks demanding justification for downvotes received and downvoters who intended to train recommendations.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    I will admit to using the "I'm training the recommended filter" excuse to justify downvotes long after the recommended page went away. Once the admins caved and added /r/politics, I gave it up.
lnanek2 13y ago
Agreed. They didn't really point out anything new or different that they will be doing. That's one of the hardest problems in development. though. It's easy to just reimplement things and mash them up, it's tough to write new stuff. Developers can waste years just rewriting Hacker News with Git logins and stronger moderation (moderation is already pretty harsh here, by the way, with far more people than spammers being ghosted) like they are doing. Personally, I far prefer Slashdot's model where I can build up a stable of friends and enemies and have their contributions filtered differently. I can filter out the useless cheerleaders while other people can show only them. Yay. It sounds like this thing's focus on pre-caching for performance and forcing the whole community to only say happy things will prevent them from user customized responses and views, though. So I don't expect them to break any new ground in showing more useful stuff and less chaff.
tlrobinson 13y ago
Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. I think it's hilarious this is one of the top comments about a site which has "Criticism is kept to the constructive variety" as one of it's goals.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  I see that comment as being constructive criticism, without a doubt. It concisely points out at least three very relevant ideas: 1) There's nothing particularly innovative about this proposed approach. 2) The past attempts haven't necessarily been successful, and taking the same (or a very similar) approach one more time also likely won't lead to any more success. 3) The lack of success in the past is very likely due to problems inherent to the approach itself.
protomyth 13y ago
I'm surprised that more sites haven't gone down the road advogato[1] went. I guess it could result in an echo chamber and their seed accounts might not be the right thing, but it seems like a different approach. 1) http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
AsymetricCom 13y ago
But this one is an App™ !

rhizome 13y ago

You're right that it's a problem of Information Architecture, but recommendation engines aren't the only next step possible.

icedog 13y ago
Please indulge us on other next steps.

mitchty 13y ago

I agree upvotes suck, but I think part of the problem is both displaying the score, and allowing downvotes to influence things. I'd like more builtin randomness for things. Display comments but display them randomly instead of by any sort of score maybe. But then this all belies the biggest issue I have with reddit/hn/whatever. Trying to follow discussions is painful as its hard to ascertain what has been posted since you last read things and not. That alone is my biggest gripe with most of this, even newsgroup readers made things much easier to follow discussion. But I'm curious, how would the netflix style algorithms work in practice? It would seem like it would just encourage more filterbubbleish input not? Occasionally off topic news tends to be somewhat engaging and I don't like the idea of removing serendipity amongst news/programming articles. I may not use haskell for example often or even at all, but lots of the time I do see articles that really end up being well worth my time to read.

raganwald 13y ago

Perhaps they simply want to create a community that discourages "Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content," and encourages If someone wants to take the next step in internet content curation then they need to adapt a netflix style algorithm.

jeremymcanally 13y ago

That's somewhat close to what http://getprismatic.com http://getprismatic.com is doing. It works fairly well, but I wish I could explicitly tell it what I want to read rather than it just assuming what I want from things I and others tweet about.

twoodfin 13y ago

One of reddit's key features in the early days was a "recommended" page that was supposedly trained by your up/down votes. It never seemed to work all that well and was abandoned after a year or so.

incision 13y ago
I always though this was a horrible idea for a system where users are simultaneously consumers expressing their preferences and curators/creators being rated through the same metric. I recall lots of angry back and forth between folks demanding justification for downvotes received and downvoters who intended to train recommendations.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  I will admit to using the "I'm training the recommended filter" excuse to justify downvotes long after the recommended page went away. Once the admins caved and added /r/politics, I gave it up.

lnanek2 13y ago

Agreed. They didn't really point out anything new or different that they will be doing. That's one of the hardest problems in development. though. It's easy to just reimplement things and mash them up, it's tough to write new stuff. Developers can waste years just rewriting Hacker News with Git logins and stronger moderation (moderation is already pretty harsh here, by the way, with far more people than spammers being ghosted) like they are doing. Personally, I far prefer Slashdot's model where I can build up a stable of friends and enemies and have their contributions filtered differently. I can filter out the useless cheerleaders while other people can show only them. Yay. It sounds like this thing's focus on pre-caching for performance and forcing the whole community to only say happy things will prevent them from user customized responses and views, though. So I don't expect them to break any new ground in showing more useful stuff and less chaff.

tlrobinson 13y ago

Ugh. I'm tired of people trying the same old crap to curate content. I think it's hilarious this is one of the top comments about a site which has "Criticism is kept to the constructive variety" as one of it's goals.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
I see that comment as being constructive criticism, without a doubt. It concisely points out at least three very relevant ideas: 1) There's nothing particularly innovative about this proposed approach. 2) The past attempts haven't necessarily been successful, and taking the same (or a very similar) approach one more time also likely won't lead to any more success. 3) The lack of success in the past is very likely due to problems inherent to the approach itself.

protomyth 13y ago

I'm surprised that more sites haven't gone down the road advogato[1] went. I guess it could result in an echo chamber and their seed accounts might not be the right thing, but it seems like a different approach. 1) http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html

AsymetricCom 13y ago

But this one is an App™ !